What is the difference between RPO and RTO from a backup perspective?
RTO is not the time it takes to recover a system, which some people tend to think that’s what it means. It is actually an objective; how quickly you need your systems backup and running. This is driven by potential losses and business requirements. The business will dictate how quickly you need a business process to resume incase it is interrupted and ultimately, how quickly the supporting infrastructure needs to be back up and running. That is your RTO. The RPO is really a point in time. So when we say that we are backing up daily, that gives us a recovery capability of up to 24 hours. So the point in time is up to 24 hours. Again, an RPO is an objective that is also driven by a business requirement. It will also dictate how much data loss is acceptable to your company. Let’s go back to daily backups for an example. If you back up at night at 6:00 p.m. and the server goes down the following day at 4:00 p.m., then you’ve potentially lost 22 hours of data that was created during that da
The recovery point objective (RPO) and the recovery time objective (RTO) are two very specific parameters that are closely associated with recovery. The RTO is how long you can basically go without a specific application. This is often associated with your maximum allowable or maximum tolerable outage. The RTO is really used to dictate your use of replication or backup to tape or disk. That also dictates what you will put together for an infrastructure whether it’s a high-availability cluster for seamless failover or something more modest. If your RTO is zero (I cannot go down) then you may opt to have a completely redundant infrastructure with replicated data offsite and so on. If your RTO is 48 hours or 72 hours then maybe tape backup is OK for that specific application. That’s the RTO. The RPO is slightly different. This dictates the allowable data loss — how much data can I afford to lose? In other words, if I do a nightly backup at 7:00 p.m. and my system goes up in flames at 4:0
